The present invention relates to one person work spaces designed to facilitate and enhance use of technology in open floor plan environments and more specifically to work spaces designed to support individual work activities as well as accommodate two person and videoconference activities in open floor plan spaces.
Many companies purchase or rent large amounts of office space and provide either personal offices or personal workstations or spaces (e.g., cubicles) for each employee for performing individual employment tasks. In many of these cases, each employee is provided with a computer of some type including, among other components, a display and one or more input devices (e.g., a keyboard) for generating and accessing digital media content. Personal computers are also used to facilitate videoconferencing within dedicated private spaces. Conference rooms are set up to facilitate meetings among two or more employees where the conference rooms often include, among other things, large displays for facilitating videoconferences and for sharing digital media content.
In the last few years, in an effort to reduce real estate costs, many companies have started to eliminate many dedicated personal offices and workstations in company facilities by having employees work directly out of their homes most of the time. In these cases, when an employee needs to periodically be at a company facility for some reason, many companies provide “hotdesks” at their facilities that can be used by any employee on a part time (e.g., by the day, by the hour, etc.) basis. Many known hotdesk configurations are very simple and may include nothing more than a table or bench having a plurality of spaces where any employee can use any of the bench spaces while at a company facility. For instance, an employee may set up a temporary office with the employee's laptop supported at one of the hotdesk spaces. Other hotdesks may include a computer and a keyboard or other input device for use by visiting employees. Still other hotdesks may include more structure such as a conventional partition wall structure surrounding a computer supported by a worksurface. To support group activities among co-located employees, most employers still provide large conference rooms equipped with large displays for digital data sharing and videoconferencing.
While hotdesks have been employed successfully to reduce real estate costs in many companies, known hotdesks have several shortcomings which likely reduce overall worker efficiency and effectiveness. For instance, because many employees routinely access digital media on display screens and often access several applications at once, it would be advantageous to have access to at least one relatively large display screen at a hotdesk. Hotdesks that require employees to use laptop computers clearly do not provide large display screen access. Other hotdesks equipped with screens typically have small display screens.
As another instance, many hotdesks do not provide enough enclosure to give user's a sense of privacy. For instance, where hotdesks comprise spaces at a bench, hotdesk users are completely exposed which can cause anxiety as well as minimize the frankness with which user's verbally communicate with others in their hotdesk space and remotely via phone or videoconference. In other cases hotdesks may be too enclosed to effectively support dyadic communication. To this end, while the lions share of tasks performed by employees are performed independent of other people, it is believed that the second largest volume of tasks performed by employees involve communications between only two people. While small enclosed hotdesks may be ideal for use by a single employee, the small enclosed space often is too tight for use by two people. In these cases, instead of using a small, enclosed space to facilitate dyadic communications, often two employees will seek out a large conference space to share ideas and collaborate or will simply attempt to collaborate in an open facility space using a laptop or the like to access digital media.
Where the number of enclosed conference spaces are small, collaboration in open spaces using laptops occurs more often which it is believed has an adverse affect on collaboration both because small screens are not optimal for viewing by two people and because people naturally are less inclined to openly share thoughts in a completely open space. While a company could build out a great number of large conference spaces, those spaces would be too large for optimal dyadic collaboration.
As still one other instance, hotdesks often require users to use relatively poor quality equipment for videoconferencing. For example, in many cases hotdesk user's have to use their laptop screens, cameras and speakers and ambient lighting to videoconference. In these cases often the lighting is poor resulting in a poor quality image being presented to a remote conferee, the speakers are not high quality and are not oriented to emanate sound directly toward a hotdesk user and the laptop screens are too small to present a realistic image of a remote conferee. In addition, laptop display screens are often supported on a worksurface height desk so that they are angled rearward from bottom to top so that a remote conferee's image is presented in a somewhat horizontal orientation. The angled screen position often results in a video of the local conferee that is not head on (e.g., resulting in alignment “up the nose”) resulting in a poor experience for the remote conferee. Exacerbating matters, laptop users can change the distance between a laptop and the user which changes the size of the user in the resulting video so that the user's size is often too large or too small in the resulting video. Where a dedicated screen is provided at a hotdesk, many of the problems described above with laptops still persist as ambient lighting and relative positions of displays, cameras and local conferees continue to be issues.
Thus, it would be advantageous to have workspace configurations that are optimized for personal use but which have attributes that are also relatively optimal for facilitating dyadic collaboration between two persons. It would also be advantageous if the workspace configurations were configured to optimize a videoconferencing experience with optimized lighting, optimized camera to local conferee distance and optimized and directional audio support. It would further be advantageous if the workspace configurations were simply configured and relatively inexpensive to configure.
These and other objects and advantages of the invention will be apparent from the description that follows and from the drawings which illustrate embodiments of the invention, and which are incorporated herein by reference.